Jen Psaki says "we created this problem" — the problem on the southern border.

This is a strange little gaffe — or slipping out of the truth — from yesterday's White House Press Conference. 

You can hear it in the clip...

... and see it in the transcript: 

Speaker 6: And I just had another on the vice-president visiting the border or not visiting the border. Republicans and Conservatives are going crazy on Twitter, sending pictures... sending video of her interview with Lester Holt saying I’ve not been to Europe either. Does the president think there is a scenario in which she should visit the border? And also the mounting criticism from Conservatives, would that ever factor into a decision to send her down there? I mean, don’t they have a point that if she has this task in front of her, should she not see the end cause as well as the root cause of what-

Jen Psaki: Well, first as I said to Peter, at some point she may go to the border. I don’t have any trips to [preview] for you or predict or a timeline for that. But what I would reiterate is that her assignment was to work with countries and leaders in the Northern triangle to address root causes, address corruption, ensure we’re working together to address humanitarian concerns. I will say we’re not taking advice from former President Trump or most of the Republicans who are criticizing us on this, given they were all sitting there while we created this problem we walked into both at the border and with the movement of migration that has been growing over the last year. So we’re not taking our guidance and advice from them, but if it is constructive and it moves the ball forward for her to visit the border, she certainly may do that.

Now look at the larger phrase: "we created this problem we walked into." Did they create the problem or walk into the problem? I'm guessing what happened there is she heard herself admit to creating the problem and didn't want to call attention to it by saying something like "I mean" before inserting the notion of walking into the problem. She fluidly tried to make the relevant phrase feel like "this problem we walked into." If there were no recording or transcript, perhaps no one would remember the words "we created." So it's a clever skill. 

But, of course, we have the video and the transcript, and the admission "we created this problem" jibes with the facts. Good! Credit her with telling the truth. But then what of "we walked into"? They walked into the solution the Trump administration had been working on to deal with a longstanding problem. Who knows if the Trump approach would have worked in the long run, but the Biden administration is responsible for the changes it made and consequences of those changes. I'm sure Psaki knows that, and if you sift through the verbiage, you get to the nugget of unusually frank admission, "we created this problem."